Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

The few times I've let a company sucker me into engaging with a chatbot, it was nothing but a worse interface to searching their support website. It was capable of nothing but directing me to pages which could not help me, because what I needed was not more information about the problem I already knew I had, but someone to fix the damn problem.

Sometimes there will be a loop that's tough to break out of where the "Contact us" tells you to talk to a chat bot before putting in a ticket or showing you a phone number, and the bot won't be able to help but will spit you out to the page that tells you to talk to the chat bot rather than give you info for actual support until you find the special event chain that leads it to let you talk to people, or attempt to.

xfinity is absolutely lousy for this. at least with a human representative, i can let them know right out of the gate that, yes, i've power cycled my CPE, and yes, i've bypassed my own network to confirm the problem is not with my equipment. every single time i've had to go through this dance, they acknowledge that the problem is on their end and can fix it right away or put in a work order. every time i've had to interact with a chatbot, it wastes 15 minutes of my time before directing me to call (and deal with an audio chatbot until i convince it to let me talk to a person).

Why should Xfinity make any changes if you still send them money every month?

This doesn’t work for technical people, but it works for the other 90% of people who’d rather call and waste not only support’s time, but their own time even if their problem can be resolved by common sense or the first page of the knowledge base.

Companies need to offer an “advanced support” option - a separate number with big scary warnings where every call whose resolution is due to your own fault or something findable on the docs ends up charging the user a fee. In exchange, it directly bypasses all chatbots and first-line support.

I’ve never heard an argument why companies don’t do that, it seems like it would be a win-win for everyone to get the customers to self-triage before reaching out.

This is downvoted for some reason and yet it’s absolutely correct. There’s a reason telcos specifically are notorious for the shittiest customer service ever - because major telcos typically have a monopoly and/or long-term contracts the customer can’t easily leave. They could literally bill you and not provide any service, and most people would still pay at least a couple months while fighting to cancel or get it resolved to avoid getting their credit report dinged.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/806/

I needed to cancel cable service recently. I lied about moving to another state to minimize the upsell and retention BS in their script but they still tried so desperately. After a human rep hung up on me, I threatened to sue when dealing with their interactive voice responder. That got me back to a human immediately.

i'll try to assume this isn't a snarky response! but it kinda sounds like it.

unfortunately, there are no "good" ISPs in my area. xfinity and the other big ones killed most of the competition via undercutting, lobbying and the legal system (ie, tying up municipal fiber/wifi initiatives in bureaucratic hell).

since i no longer work from home, it's mostly just a convenience to have internet service for personal use. i actually use it very little, and pay for the cheapest option available, so it's not much money.

Yep, very much aware of them and a happy customer!

In fact you don’t even need to say “shibboleet” - I don’t think they even have anyone on payroll that doesn’t know at least 2 programming languages.

1 US worker = About 3-8 outsourced workers. Somewhere in there the logic of hiring many US Workers to manage said advanced customer service (they'd have to native speak English) is not worth the cost of the department. Even with the fee.

But I assume they have US-based workers anyway to handle escalations. So the proposal is to simply allow users to self-escalate and pay a fee if they waste time.

I had an experience like this in a real-life non technical situation.

Walking down the street I receive a text to say my glasses were ready to be picked up. I had not purchased any glasses, and the store that I was to collect them from was not in the city I live in. By coincidence I was approximately 30 meters from a branch of the same store in my town. I popped in to tell them that someone had entered a phone number incorrectly and someone might need to told by other means that their glasses were ready.

The response? "Certainly sir, can I have your name, and address". Explaining how this information was not relevant was not fruitful. I was reluctant to provide this information because about the only thing they could have done with it was to add it to the account that matched the phone number. I wasn't in the mood to engage in identity theft for a free pair of glassees, but the conversation was going in circles. Eventually another staff member observed the rising tension and offered to take care of this difficult situation. She took my phone number, and the address of the branch that had sent the text, said thank you for the notification and she would sort it out with the other branch. I was out of the store within 30 seconds of her taking over.

Engaging with employee one, I would've just snarkily said, "This is dumb, can I talk to your chatbot, please?".

No snark, I just don’t see why Xfinity would have any motivation to change their process if it doesn’t have an impact on the bottom line.

I moved states, and changed my service to the new address. They started billing me for both addresses for several months.

Several calls and many, many hours later, I was finally able to get the double-billing resolved. But they didn't remove the charges that had accrued. Several calls later I was able to get someone who assured me they could deal with the issue. I demanded a $50 statement credit as compensation for my time.

They flipped the sign on the statement credit, and it was an additional $50 charge.

I got called by their collections department. I patiently explained the issue, and they were very sympathetic. Then they asked why don't I just settle up the outstanding balance now and then we can sort out the billing issue later. For the first time in this ordeal I lost my cool and flatly told them to go fuck themselves.

Several calls later it was finally resolved, but this entire experience was astounding. There was nobody qualified to escalate to. I was completely at the mercy of the random humans the system picked for me to interact with, and there were seemingly zero knobs I could turn or buttons to push to summon someone who could actually assist. To their credit, many of the support staff seemed just as frustrated as I was, but were equally hamstrung by the system they were interacting with.

ah well, we're dealing with economies of scale far greater than individual subscribers. and trust me, i've weighed going offline-only at home (not including mobile data), but for what relatively-little i do pay, i'm not ready to unplug just yet.

Because "customer support" is supposed to be, at least on its face, friendly and supportive. It's not good business to actively antagonize or challenge your customers.

An oldie, but goodie.

This may even be from the turn of the century: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI2xK6zbaoI

Basically Uber support these days. Except theirs uses an LLM which gives you an even more useless layer of pretending to help.

  > due to your own fault or something findable on the docs ends up charging the user a fee.

  | But the plans were on display…”
  “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
 “That’s the display department.”
  “With a flashlight.”
  “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
  “So had the stairs.”
  “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
  “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.
  - Hitchhiker's Guide 

I don't see that going well... it presents a completely different "opportunity"